Performance comparison between Windows gcc compiled & Visual Studio compiled

I'm currently compiling an open source optimization library (n开发者_高级运维ative C++) supplied with makefiles for use with gcc. As I am a Windows user, I'm curious on the two options I see of compiling this, using gcc with MinGW/Cygwin or manually building a Visual Studio project and compiling the source.

1) If I compile using MinGW/Cygwin + gcc, will the resulting .lib (static library) require any libraries from MinGW/Cygwin? I.e. can I distribute my compiled .lib to a Windows PC that doesn't have MinGW/Cygwin and will it still run?

2) Other than performance differences between the compilers themselves, is there an overhead associated when compiling using MinGW/Cygwin and gcc - as in does the emulation layer get compiled into the library, or does gcc build a native Windows library?

3) If speed is my primary objective of the library, which is the best method to use? I realise this is quite open ended, and I may be best running my own benchmarks, but if someone has experience here this would be great!

The whole point of Cygwin is the Linux emulation layer, and by default (ie if you don't cross-compile), binaries need cygwin1.dll to run.

This is not the case for MinGW, which creates binaries as 'native' as the ones from MSVC. However, MinGW comes with its own set of runtime libraries, in particular libstdc++-6.dll. This library can also be linked statically by using -static-libstdc++, in which case you also probably want to compile with -static-libgcc.

This does not mean that you can freely mix C++ libraries from different compilers (see this page on mingw.org). If you do not want to restrict yourself to an extern "C" interface to your library, you most likely will have to choose a single compiler and stick with it.

As to your performance concerns: Using Cygwin only causes a (minor?) penalty when actually interacting with the OS - where raw computations are concerned, only the quality of the optimizer matters.